It was our first Tournament of the year, The SCSSA Early Bird. Ollie Burwell, Butch Cooper, Robbie Beard, his fiancée Tasha and I were fishing aboard The Sweet Deal owned by Buddy Barton. It had been a long slow day for us and for the other two boats that had decided to fish south. We had put several dolphin in the boat but not much to brag about, lines out was at 4 and it was getting close. Sure that our day was over Ollie turned the boat home, 58 miles to go.
We were getting things straight to start pulling in lines and that’s when it happened, it slammed the downrigger and took off! I grabbed the rod and Robbie grabbed the belt and wrapped it around me. Big wahoo is what we all thought. Ollie immediately called it in on the radio; big fish on we don’t know what it is… It was 3:57. I stood there for just a second while everyone cleared lines and at a little less than half a spool I told Ollie lets go. He threw it in reverse and the chase was on, I guess Ollie figured we all needed a bath because he put wave after wave across the transom, it was my first experience doing that and it was awesome. The fish was still smokin’ the reel and after several hundred yards it jumped and that’s when we saw it was a mako.
It was unbelievable watching a shark that size doing what it was doing. Flipping, twisting, spinning, it looked like something out of Sea World only a lot meaner. After we started picking up line she’d take off again, repeating the aerials, this happened about 10 more times some shows better than others but all were impressive, at one point with the fish no more than twenty yards behind the boat she launched again. This time it was a little scary, when she crashed it was close enough that it soaked everyone.
We finally got her to the boat and she decided not to stay, after four more tries Butch got hold to the leader and was not going to let that fish get away. We couldn’t get a tail rope on her at first but Butch decided to try for the head, at least to hold her. Once that was on, Robbi